Run Norton antivirus overnight, stops after a while

[pcdummy]

T30, usually takes 4 hours to run anti-virus so schedule to run overnight. It seems to stop/stall after a while due to inactivity, and only picks up again once the machine is used. Any ideas?
The power management option for the harddrive is set to not to stop.

[been200mph]

Egads! 4 hours to run! I am not a computer guru by any means, but I ditched the Norton stuff immediately on my PC and laptop as well. A friend who is an IT wiz told me to try Trend Microsystem's PC-cillin as it's not a memory hog and is a better system to use. All I know is that after dumping the trial version of Norton stuff and buying the PC-cillin things seem to operate much quicker. It takes under 10 minutes to do a system scan. As to adware I use the free Ad-Aware SE Personal and run it once a day.

[Kyocera]

Unless you have a 100g hd loaded with stuff with 5mb of free space this is truly an outrage even for norton. I have ditched norton on both laptops and anything else I use nowdays because of it's almost arrogant ("excuse me I need 5 bazillion megs of ram to properly protect your little computer, and you WILL restart your computer after this half hour update or your computer will not be protected, excuse me but I need to block this program, don't YOU WORRY what it is, I will determine what is important") use of resources.

AVG!

RANT OVER

[jdhurst]

Albeit the Corporate edition, Symantec keeps my T41 clean in under 5 minutes a day, and it is the same for T30's my clients use. ... JD Hurst

[swifty]

I am not too fond of Symantec's anti-virus -- it has caused me many problems in the past. Network Associated antivirus is great, if you can't get the corporate bersion, get the regular for home users or get grisoft anti virus - its free. 4 hours seems like it hangs somewhere and it restarts or something.

short of a clean instal of the program, change it
and if you do decide to uninstall the thing, to make sure nothing is saved, uninstal, then any remaining folders rename them to something else complitely different, then reinstall the program and then get rid of the renamed folders. Lots of other factors could influence the lenght of time, such as many files which can be infected (some files do not get scanned) are being scanned, many of them could be really small, you could have a fragmented hdd, etc.

change or reinstall... if you already paid a long subscription, call them and get support for the product see what they can do for you

[djpharoah]

i use gentoo linux 95% of the time so no need for a/v . however the 5% im in windows 2k i leave my a/v duties to AVG free edition.

so far so good.
-dj

[pcdummy]

Anyone have idea about why everything would stall with inactivity? It just picks up again when I move the mouse a couple of hours later.

[swifty]

Anyone have idea about why everything would stall with inactivity? It just picks up again when I move the mouse a couple of hours later.

This is one of the problems. Symantec software has issues with some configurations. If you examine the Symantec support forums / sites available on the web, you will see problems come up when using said software. Additionally, its worst when you use the software called "works" from symantec. it pretty much locks up the machine many times (when its supposed to prevent just that) because of low resources. I beleive it has some sort of memory leak and that is why it stalls even when you are not doing anything. Its not your machine, its the software. My suggestions is as before, remove the program, try to do a clean install with updates and see if it helps - if not, just get another piece of software. As a matter of fact, on all the ibm desktops and laptops I support, its the first thing I do, remove that and install NAI.

sorry I can't be more helpful

[BruisedQuasar]

I was a Norton utilities fan from the early days when Peter Norton utilities was shareware. I noticed a decline in quality and efficiency began soon after Norton sold to Symantic. The 2005 versions are Microsoft quality. I had to say goodbye to an old friend. I think the king of utilities now is iolo, System Mechanic (latest is version 6). You can download fully functional versions of System Mechanic 6 & 6 Pro, free for 30 days. Download 6 Pro and run the virus scan on your PC. First, I would run the utility pack and repair, defrag, etc your HDD and then run the virus scan. Use it free for 30 days.

Sys Mech 6 is cheaper than Sys Mech 6 Pro. The Pro version includes spy, malware & virus scanners. If you want a good free virus scanner that includes daily updates, take a look at avast. You can download a clean, safe copy from ZDNET.COM

This deal expired over a month ago but I recently went to this address and used it for a friend. Go to [www.iolo.com/pny] and get 6 or 6 pro at a substantial discount. You need this data to get the special offer: 512MB, PC133, Part # N512S133W (PNY Technologies included this deal with notebook memory modules) If I left out any necessary data let me know.

--Bruised